John Whitfield

ENG 197, Dembrow

March 7, 2005

African Lenses, Western Images

Africa is a stage in a Western cinema. The West has cast Africa’s children as slaves, props, and pawn. Reluctant characters in this theater, Africans fell victim to insurmountable machine of Western imperialism. For hundreds of years, the Western machine forced itself upon Africa, and as Africa was raped during European colonization and the slavery of Africans in the United States, the West impregnated Africa with its culture and influence. The product of that rape would be born as cultural hybridism resulting in identity crises and the continued victimization of Africa and Africans long after the end of colonialism and slavery. How today, does Africa, still reeling from the Western attack, view the West? Through the lens of modern African film, one can view the West on an African stage, and learn through African eyes the extent of the devastation caused to Africa by the West.

Though the United States was never a colonial power in Africa, its exploitation of Africa was equally as ponderous and utterly destructive. While Europe plundered Africa’s precious material resources, the U.S. stole her souls. From 1600 to the mid 1800s, African sweat and blood built the United States. The cultural and emotional damage wreaked by this demonic exploitation is immeasurable and unfathomable. The film Sankofa captures a small but brutal glimpse of this type of insidious devastation. It addresses the emotional damage experienced by Africans and African Americans because of forced separations from family members, cultural alienation and oppression, and forced captivity and slavery.

Particularly compelling is Sankofa’s representation of the complex identity issues that result from slavery. One character in particular, Joe, the son of an enslaved African woman impregnated by rape, is a heart-wrenching example of this complexity. His identity torn, he becomes a son to no one, a man without an identity that becomes a murderer. In the film’s climax, Joe performs matricide, wishing to rid himself of a link to Africa. The murder forces him to realize that he cannot change his identity, and as he commits suicide, the message is made clear that slavery is not only physically abusive, it is mentally devastating.

Sankofa also addresses the issues of religious oppression and cultural isolation. Africa is a continent rich with indigenous religious diversity. Slaves were not only forced to work, raped, and murdered, they were also forced into religious conversion. Robbed of their families, their freedom, and even their beliefs, they were destitute. Sankofa shows the will of enslaved Africans to remain connected to their traditions. The cadre of characters holds clandestine meetings deep in the woods in which they evoke their old religious traditions, trying desperately to remain connected to their cultural identities.

Though African eyes, the film shows the U.S. as an amoral villain, just as culpable as any European colonial power. It shows that the destructive legacy of the theft of identity and culture resulting from slavery is irrevocable. It encourages African not to forget the crimes against them at the hands of the U.S., but instead to live toward the future with an eye on the past, remembering what has happened to them and their families.

European colonialism, though officially only about 100 years in duration, still impacts Africa though neocolonialism. As the descendants of American slaves still address issues of social inequality and identity in the United States, inhabitants of formerly European colonized African nations face similar issues. The beautiful film Pieces d’Identites addresses the issue of African identity in the face of neocolonialism. In it, the main character, Mani-kango of the Congo, tries to reconcile his childhood feelings of awe and enchantment with an immediately post colonialism Belgium with the harsh reality of inequality he experiences visiting Brussels as an adult.

During colonialism, Africans were taught that their cultures were less evolved as Western cultures. Africans were forced to learn European languages, history, and religion and disregard their own. This imposition was extremely disruptive to African cultures, which were rooted in thousands of years of wisdom and experience. At the end of official colonialism, many Africans were left with identities that were altered to include European concepts of Africans. They became cultural hybrids, African by birth, European by influence.

Mani-kango thought that the best educations, educations superior to those available in Africa, were to be had in Europe, so he sent his daughter away to Brussels to become a doctor. In the course of the film, Mani-kango came to realize that Europe is no better off than his village, and that is as a matter of fact, quite worse off in many ways. He is faced with crime, immorality, exploitation, and bigotry that he did not experience in his village. He returns to his village with his daughter, offering to arrange for her an education in their medicinal traditions. His view of the West shifts, and he realizes that the image of European culture as superior is a fallacy.

The path that leads him to this realization is one that threatened his own identity. Mani-kango is taken advantage of by Belgians that would exploit him for his valuable identity pieces, his royal regalia. Mani-kango learns through this that the West will take advantage of his culture and identity to benefit itself, much like it did in the days of colonialism.

The West, perhaps no longer overtly plundering Africa’s riches, now wages its warfare through economic means. A particularly compelling aspect of this warfare is waged culturally. Pieces d’Identites touches on this with a young character, Viva-wa-Viva, who is most concerned with fashions of the West. He steals to support his obsession with the idea that “the close make the man.” The West’s neocolonialism includes creating a market for Western products among the young people of countries formerly occupied by the West. African Diaspora youth are given images through advertising that cause them to regard the West as culturally “hip.” The film ends with the lesson that preserving one’s own identity despite external influences is imperative, and that the hip image of the West is superficial and only serves Western interests.

As the West plundered Africa, many robbed her of her material resources to make themselves rich, while others used her to achieve something less tangible, ideological glorification. The film Le Grand Homme de Lamberene offers an African impression of Western “humanitarianism” near the end of official European colonialism. Though research in the West will render nary a depreciatory word for Dr. Albert Schweitzer, this film challenges his saintly Western image.

The film depicts Dr. Schweitzer as a self-promoter concerned primarily with creating and preserving his image as African savior. It implies that Dr. Schweitzer obsessively shielded the Africans in the village in which he lived from any aspect of modernity, to their ill health and detriment. While he was waited on hand and foot by Africans, he withheld basic materials from his African servants such as shoes. He is shown creating his own small colony in Lamberene, with himself as empirical ruler, his grandiose title, “le Grand Blanc (the great white man).” At times in the film, he is shown expressing outright disdain and even hostility toward Africans, often yelling at and even striking them. He also criticizes the move toward African independence, perhaps viewing it as a threat to his mini-kingdom of Lambarene.

The West awarded Schweitzer the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian aid in Africa, but the film deconstructs that image and shows him as many African close to him saw him. He is accused of “loving the idea of Africa, not Africans.” One wonders if the West might not make heroes out of men like this to assuage its guilt. There could never be enough Schweitzers to repay the debt the West owes to Africa.

Through colonialism, the West fed upon Africa for a hundred years, making herself fat and rich with the blood of this rich continent. During this time, her insatiable appetite consumed countless African souls, and the scars left by her teeth still have not healed.

Films that offer African images of the West are worthy of global attention, including Western audience. In seeing ourselves, the West, as Africans view us, we are brought into clearer focus as recipients of the wealth and privilege accumulated by exploitation of Africa. The fuzzy shadows of “democracy” and “equality” created by the West to conceal its intentions give way to clearer images of greed and imperialism.

The sankofa is an African bird that looks to its past to determine its future. As we view truer images of our culture from the perspective of African film, one can hope is that the West is heading the legend of the sankofa by looking forward to avoid repeating its bloody past. However, that lesson, when considering present neocolonialism—Western economic control of Africa—is being lost on the modern West. The hundred years of colonialism in Africa gave Europe much of the privilege she now enjoys, and African slavery created the America we now experience. African films are a voice screaming the truth in the noise of Western propaganda that shines the darkness of the truth into a false gleam. These African voices are ignored at great cost.